“My friends ask me a lot of questions about my job. There’s something very unfair about the whole situation—When a woman works as a primary school teacher it seems perfectly normal to everyone (...) But with me—the fact that I'm a man—that intrigues people. ‘It's weird that you do this work. What do you like about it?’”
“That's the first injustice—the gender issue. There's a second injustice, which is the fact that I'm a man over fifty who has retrained. People say, ‘Oh, that's incredibly brave.’ No, but wait—I'm not brave at all. There are plenty of women who retrain. ‘Yes, but you understand—a woman combines that with her family life.’”
“When a woman does that (...) we think, ‘Yes, things weren't working out in her professional life.’ I made a positive choice, she made a negative one. I receive a form of recognition, also from my friends. They say, ‘What you're doing is great.’ And I don't know if there are many women who get told that.”
“If it's a woman, she doesn't benefit from a ‘Wow’ effect, even though in the end we're doing the same job with the same values, the same motivations. In this case, I benefit from my gender and my age.”